After the breakup of his hip-hop group Jurassic 5, DJ Nu-Mark dusted himself down and set off on the long ride towards a solo album. Along the way he’d assemble a dream cast of collaborators and explore exciting new musical territories. Showcasing his masterful break-slicing, sample-flipping and slick cuts and finessing the boom-bap rap template of his former crew.
Across the tracks on Broken Sunlight he shares production credits with Quantic and A.Skillz, songwriting duties with the late Charles Bradley, and provides pitch-perfect beats for rhyme royalty like Large Professor, J-Live and Bumpy Knuckles. It was a learning curve, but treating each song like a school day let him studiously soak up everything each guest had to teach him.
I wanted to work with people that I could learn from
“I wanted to work with people that I could learn from,” remembers Nu-Mark. “It was like a bucket-list, kind of thing. Like, ‘I’ve always wanted to work with this guy’, or ‘I’ve always wanted to do vocals with them’. I went one song at a time, and traveled to each city to work with people to gain as much as I could”.
The plan was to develop his own sound out of the ashes of J5 and cement DJ Nu-Mark as an artist in his own right. Seeing as, after the group’s collapse in 2007, work was thin on the ground, instead of licking his wounds, he put his heart and soul into the music.
“I was getting my ass kicked, honestly. I mean, times were very rough. My group had broken up, my relationship of seven years was over, the phone wasn’t ringing.
“It was a big thing for me. I was trying to explain who I was, you know, after Jurassic 5 disbanded. I was trying to explain what I’m about.”
Although the future was uncertain, both privately and professionally, he wanted to make an album that was different, new, challenging. He didn’t want to simply serve up the same old styles that were expected of him.
“It’s all about throwing the audience in a cold bath,” he says. “That’s what I find anyway. Oh, I’m gonna steer the ship. You guys just come on in for the ride…”
“The studio has always been the log cabin here in North Hollywood. But some of the songs were tracked at the artist’s studios, then mixed at mine. I was using Reason and the Battery 2 drum program, and then mixing in Pro Tools. That was the rig. Reason, wow, I haven’t said that out loud for years.
“EQ-wise I was using Millenia, just to give it some tube warmth, and a Manley compressor. I’d just tap that to get a light kiss on the compression, for a little bit of liveliness on the master bus.
“Then Technics 1200s have always been in play, and whatever mixer was hot at the time – probably the Rane. When it comes to sampling, sometimes I just won’t even bother beat matching. Like a beat will be playing, and I know I need a light melodic patch of some sort, whether it be flute or violin, something droning. And I’ll just throw a record on over it and just let it clash until something works.”
Broken Sunlight track-by-track with DJ Nu-Mark
1. Times Is Rough
“It’s a short intro-type song. Like, not meant to be a single, or even a B-side for that matter. It’s just there to bring you into the album.
“There’s a synth bass in there as well as a chopped up sample. There’s cut up vocals of Ice Cube live at a show, talking. And TiRon raps. He’s part of the duo TiRon & Ayomari, who I had first wanted to work with on this album.
“I just thought they had the vocal ability of MCs from my era, but with a new and younger outlook and twist. Shortly after I put out the album, Q-Tip tweeted, ‘The next guys are TiRon & Ayomari’ [laughs]. So I was on the right path.”
2. Tonight
“This was a chance to work with the rapper J-Live. With J, you know, I always kind of feel like he should have been, like, a Native Tongue [late ’80s hip hop collective], you know? His voice fits well over everything. I’ve heard him rhyme over mediocre beats before. He makes anything sound great.
“A lot of times we get into this conversation – the beat comes first. It’s the beat. The beat is everything. If you don’t have the beat, you don’t have shit. And artists like him that command your attention will almost prove the opposite.
“And so I was like, ‘wow, it’d be curious to see what would happen with him over my production’. And it was great.”
3. The Fever
“I did this with A.Skillz, who’s a great producer with so much success since then. I mean, he’s just been Steady Eddie, and I saw that in him, and that’s why I wanted to work with him. He just has a sensibility that I’ll never have.
“We met when I played at Shambhala in Canada, and he was in the crowd. And I played three of his songs, and he was flipping out. Like, ‘Man, the way you played them was perfect’. And, ‘Man, I’ve been trying to meet you to collab…’ And so we spoke, and got this track across the finish line. It was a lot of fun. He’s a great dude.”
4. Our Generation (Re-Edit)
“This is the Ernie Hines track Our Generation; it’s the multitrack of it. I acquired a licence, and did my own edit. Yeah, that one’s pretty straightforward.
“No beefing, no layering, just editing and EQ in the right way, and compressing them right way. Just opening up what was already there, which was really beautiful.
“If you listen to the original, there’s just a ton of reverb on the drums. They’re just kind of sloshy and in the background.
“When those drums become dry, they became punchy, which is kind of my philosophy on drums anyway. I rarely put any kind of reverb or delay on my drums. Occasionally a hi-hat, you know?”
5. When You Sleep
“Large Professor’s on this. He was supposed to rhyme on Feel The Way About It, but switched at the last minute. I was like, ‘cool, whatever’s clever’, you know? Main Source was my favourite group, so this was a dream come true.
“If I had to explain to an alien what hip-hop is, I would say it’s Extra P. He embodies every part of it that I love. Incredible producer. His soul sensibility is completely intact, and he knows how to make drums knock. He knows when to mute sections. He knows how to group drums. He knows how to space his lyrics. And his lyrics are fucking incredible – he’s saying some crazy shit on this.”
6. Never Be Wrong
“This was my chance to work with Haas who was the new, younger MC. This was more of an experiment, and probably the one I went the most out on the ledge for. I wanted to see if I could work with this young artist and see what came of it, and it ended up sticking.
“It was just a little bit out of my comfort zone, which is good for me to do, to wake me up, especially in an album creation process. Strangely enough, when I sent the whole album over to DJ Premier, that was the one he gravitated to. I think he liked the intro because he could cut it up.”
7. Feel The Way About It
“TiRon & Ayomari again. And the track is made from a very rare Korean record that I sampled. That actually came off of a digging trip I had done when I was out there doing the toy set [a mind-blowing DJ routine using retro musical kid’s toys and decks], and I had a day off and came up on some crazy shit.
“And well, according to Large Professor, the way he explains it is that, ’It tugs’. He said, ‘Man, this one tugs!’ And I was just like, ‘Tugs’, damn. That’s a good way of explaining it. This track, it does in fact tug [laughs].”
8. Don’t Play Around
“I got to work with Aloe Blacc and Charles Bradley for this. It was two generations of soul, and I was curious to see how they would play off each other.
“Aloe always has a good sensibility when it comes to rhyming or singing, and always hits me with something leftfield. And so I was trying to learn, and I would definitely learn from Charles.
“Charles had The World (Is Going Up in Flames) track out. And I just was completely blown away by it. And so I flew out to Brooklyn to work with him, and he had absolutely nothing prepared.
“So I literally sat there line for line with him, and we just freestyled lines, one at a time. I think I came up with, ‘Hey baby, how about a maybe’.
“So that’s how that one landed. And he’s one of the nicest, kindest souls I’ve ever interacted with in my life. I’d actually thought Large Professor would pick that track.”
9. Vengeance Is Mine
“This was just an instrumental to let off the angst and aggression that I had in me. With Broken Sunlight, there was lot of anger and frustration in me, and this was something I could just bang out in a club.
“I suppose an MC could have gotten busy over that. I’m surprised that no-one had picked it, but it would need a very aggressive MC; a Big Shug or MOP. You know, some of those beats, you need someone with a husky voice to cut through the mid-range frequencies.
“There’s a sample at the end saying, ‘Go fuck yourself’. [There was] a lot of anger in me at the time.”
10. Dumpin’ Em All
“It was great working with Bumpy Knuckles on this. And the video was fucking hysterical.
“It was impressive, just watching him work his own gear. I thought I was going to go there to the boards, you know, while he’s in the booth, punching him in on certain sections. But he did everything himself in the booth, with a monitor and his own keyboard, and I would just listen and say, ‘Hey, can we try, uh, another layer of this’, or whatever?
“There wasn’t much for me to do – I was almost like a fish out of water. It was a producer slash engineers dream come true. He’s incredibly professional and incredibly tech.”
11. Tropicalifornia
“I made this one with Quantic, who is a guy I have a deep admiration for. God, talk about a prolific artist. My God. That guy is sensational.
“I’m not a lazy guy, and I’m constantly working. I’m constantly touring, and I’m constantly like, building my studio. I’m in the middle of building my studio at the moment, but, I mean, I’ve never had a guy make me feel more lazy than him.
“And his sense of feel is exactly where my feel resides, when it comes to Latin music. I love his tempos, his chords, his drums. We just have a lot of similarities when it comes to our musicality.”
12. Oya’ Indebure
“This is the only one where I didn’t go to the city to work with the artist. Laudir de Oliveira was a Brazilian artist I really liked, and I knew his niece and nephew, who put me in touch with him. And God bless him, as he really saved the song, because he got a whole choir of women in there to sing that powerful hook.
“This came out on a 45 too. I’ve been putting it back in my DJ sets. And I get a lot of people hitting me up about that one, looking for copies. But, when it came out, it was just crickets… I seem to be the type of artist where people sleep right when I put things out, yeah, all my releases have a late detonation [laughs].”
13. Tough Break
“Those are all musicians in there – horns, bass, and I play piano. I’ve never played this one out, not once in my sets. However, it was placed in films. That’s the only placements this ever got [laughs].
“I heard it was played at B-boy jams and stuff like that. But I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to even play a B-boy jam and I collect breaks! It’s bonkers. It escapes me why. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I stopped trying to read minds in my 20s. So I just go with the flow.”
DJ Nu-Mark recently published his own musically-inspired cookbook/autobiography, Amu Nu. It features family recipes and a guide to Middle Eastern cuisine by his hip-hop chums DJ Premier, Posdnuos of De La Soul, and comedian Russell Peters. First editions come with a flexi-disc, and a QR code to bag a two-hour mix of the funkiest Turkish, Iranian, Armenian and Lebanese music that kickstarted the whole project.
For all the latest links to new music and merch, get yourself over to DJ Nu-Mark's official website.
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